Every weekend I have a few routine things that I do to fuel up my mind and creative thinking. Here are three worth checking out.

1) I watch the 7-10 minute video on Ad Age Magazine’s The Creativity Top 5: The Best Brand Ideas of the Week.
Here you will see some amazing examples of brand building at its best. Sure many of the brands featured are big global brands with enormous budgets, that’s OK, ask yourself how their work inspires what you are doing for your brand? You can sign up to get this in your inbox weekly or visit the Ad Age site.

2) Either Saturday or Sunday morning, I set my phone alarm for 9am ET and I watch VH1’s Top 20 music videos.  From the music videos, I pick up fashion trends, design ideas and from the interviews I learn what’s trending in music and lifestyle and who is the hot new talent. VH1’s prime audience is a wide net of consumers aged 18-49. So if you are trying to stay relevant to Millennials or Gen Yers,Gen Xers, or hipper Baby Boomers like moi, this is a good way to spend and hour. Why not burn some calories too and dance or exercise while you are watching.

3) I read Fast Company’s online blog. They cover companies and individuals who are breaking ground on innovation and creativity. This week I read about a very cool tool from IBM. It’s called The Tone Analyzer and uses linguistic analysis to detect emotional tones, social propensities, and styles in written communication. Then it offers suggestions to help the writer improve their intended language tones. This is an excellent feedback tool to gauge your brand voice.  Read the article here. You can also input your text here and learn how your brand language is communicating.

Have a creative week! and Brand on!